The Blood Red Sea

By Ron Faust

A Dan Shaw Thriller
In this enticing thriller, Dan Shaw risks the deep waters of wealth, deception, and murder off the Gold Coast to see rustic done for a beautiful woman.
Dan Shaw has been practicing law only four months and he’s already burned out. Add the fact that he’s just lost his longtime girlfriend and the cops are scouring his dubious past, and it’s no wonder that Shaw decides to set sail for the summer and get away from it all. But even alone in the middle of the sea, trouble finds him—in the enticing form of Katherine Adams. When Shaw hauls her out of the ocean, she’s naked, nearly drowned, and has little memory as to how she got that way. But the real story is even more twisted. Her husband, Cesar Cardinal, is a diplomat, a playboy, and a high-stakes gambler. He’s feigned his wife’s suicide at sea and taken their young son to a heavily armed compound in the Dominican Republic, where U.S. law can’t touch him. But that’s not going to stop Shaw, who can’t deny his feelings for Katherine. From Bell Harbor to Santo Domingo, he’s baiting a trap with his own life . . . and there’s no telling what he’ll catch.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781620454510

Ron Faust

RON FAUST is the author of fourteen previous thrillers. He has been praised for his “rare and remarkable talent” (Los Angeles Times), and several of his books have been optioned for films. Before he began writing, he played professional baseball and worked at newspapers in Colorado Springs, San Diego, and Key West.

Book preview

PRAISE FOR

RON FAUST

Faust's prose is as smooth and bright as a sunlit mirror.

—Publishers Weekly

"Faust's style is laconic, his story engrossing, his

extraordinarily wide variety of characters richly realized."

—Gregory McDonald, award-winning author of Fletch

"The kind of stunning writer you want to keep recommending

after you discover him."

—David Morrell, author of Covenant of the Flame

"Faust is a Homeric storyteller with an eye for the odd

character and a fine gift for Spartan dialogue."

—Library Journal

"Voluble villains, wise friends and fickle ones . . . Faust writes

well . . . charming and violent."

—Los Angeles Times

ALSO BY RON FAUST

The Burning Sky

Dead Men Rise Up Never

Death Fires

Fugitive Moon

In the Forest of the Night

Jackstraw

The Long Count

Lord of the Dark Lake

Nowhere to Run

Sea of Bones

Snowkill

When She Was Bad

The Wolf in the Clouds

Turner Publishing Company

424 Church Street • Suite 2240 • Nashville, Tennessee 37219

445 Park Avenue • 9th Floor • New York, New York 10022

www.turnerpublishing.com

THE BLOOD RED SEA

Copyright © 1997, 2000, 2014 Jim Donovan

All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover design: Glen Edelstein

Book design: Glen Edelstein

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faust, Ron.

The blood red sea / Ron Faust.

     pages cm

ISBN 978-1-62045-450-3 (pbk.)

1. Sailing--Fiction. 2. Dominican Republic--Fiction. I. Title.

PS3556.A98B56 2014

813'.54--dc23

     2013025216

Printed in the United States of America

14 15 16 17 18 19 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Gayle

THE BLOOD RED SEA

ONE

Draw a circle ten inches in diameter. The scale is seventeen nautical miles per inch. Pencil an X at the center; that's the little sloop Roamer, and her position is 19.5 degrees, twenty-nine minutes north; 66 degrees, twelve minutes east. Your diagram represents a great round patch of ocean one hundred and seventy miles in diameter. Pencil in waves if you like, and tiny arrows that show the angle of the southeast trade wind, and insert a dot close to Roamer's starboard beam—that's her: Kate.

     Now if you are mathematically inclined, calculate the approximate total area enclosed. Convert those inches, at scale, to surface acres or hectares or square miles or square kilometers, any useful system of measurement. So, taking the sloop's central position, and extending a line around the perimeter, you will find that the nearest land, the north coast of Puerto Rico, is exactly five inches—eighty-five nautical miles—distant. And note that the boat is located over the Puerto Rican Trench, not far, in fact, from the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean, at 28,321 feet. That's almost as deep as Mount Everest is tall. A lot of water, then, beneath the keel, a lot of water all around, and the bright powdery band of the Milky Way above. Surely there are other boats within our circle, but they are below the horizon, invisible to us.

     You can imagine how vast this circular patch of sea is, how barren, how deep, what an awful midnight desolation. . .

     Now tell me: what are the odds of your finding a lone swimmer there, a woman, in the middle of the night?

TWO

It was an ordinary Monday morning: the incomparable Candace, behind her cluttered desk, held the muzzle of a chrome-plated pistol near her right temple. It emitted the sort of humming that, in sci-fi dramas, signifies the operation of a lethal death-ray device. Candace squinted her eyes shut and then opened them wide in greeting, and shifted the death-ray gun's muzzle to her damp blond bangs.

     Three more sad losers were sitting in the straight-backed wooden chairs that lined a wall of the outer office: two men and a woman, all trying to look innocent and hopeful in their misery. Candace complained about the difficulty of doing her work while being persecuted by the stares of waiting felons, but there had been little work to perform until such clients began appearing. And she still had time for her obsessive grooming.

     Good morning, Candace, I said.

     She switched off the hair dryer. Buenos días, mi caro Señor Pendejo.

     Candace was dating a Cuban who had slyly told her that the word pendejo, like caballero, could be defined as noble gentleman. And so lately she had been addressing men as Mr. Pubic Hair, or in the secondary meaning, Mr. Fool. She called seventy-nine-year-old Judge Levi Samuelson Señor Pendejo Viejo—Mr. Old Pubic Hair. We did not correct her; we left that to someone who might be less restrained in his retaliation.

     I glanced at the fifty-gallon aquarium that sat atop a shelf of law books; two more of the bright tropical fish had died over the weekend, and now, colors dimmed and tails curled in rigor mortis, they floated above the miniature sunken galleon and tendrils of weed.

     There were two narrow offices at the rear of the large outer office. Mine was on the left. The room always smelled of dust and mildew after being closed for a couple of days. I switched on the air-conditioning and sprayed the room with a chemical deodorant named Sea Breeze.

     I sat at my desk and shuffled through the morning mail, trash-canning all brown envelopes, envelopes that heralded the chance of a lifetime, and envelopes with a cellophane window on the face. I opened those that might conceivably contain a check. None did, but I found an invitation to a wedding that had taken place Saturday.

     Candace soon came in, leaned back against the door, and said, A serial shoplifter, a car thief, and a crazy woman who thinks the government is tampering with her womb.

     What are they doing to it?

     Her womb?

     Yes.

     They put a microchip in there.

     Why?

     I don't know. But she wants to sue.

     Candace wore a knit dress that was modest in every respect except for the body inserted within.

     Which do you want to see first? she asked.

     Tell those people I'm booked full, Candace. Send the two men back to whoever referred them to me. Send the woman to a gynecologist. I'm not accepting any more of these wretched cases.

     Thank God, she said, and she returned to the outer office.

     I leaned back in my chair and proceeded to deconstruct Candace. First, I mentally eliminated the artificial coloring from her hair. The natural color was a light brown tending toward dusty blond, but her hairdresser bleached it to a canary yellow with platinum streaks. And it seemed full of compressed air. I let the air out, and chipped away at the hair-spray glaze. Excellent. Next I removed her lavender contact lenses, removed the mink eyelashes from her lids, restored all the plucked eyebrow hairs, and wiped away the mascara and eye shadow. Yes. Now the phosphorescent orange lipstick had to go, and the matching orange talons—long, curved false fingernails. I mentally wet a handkerchief and wiped away the various skin enhancers and foundation formulas and liquid blushes that I presumed had names like NaturGlow and PassionFlush. I finished my work and saw that it was good. Candace was now a healthy, pretty young woman with lively brown eyes and an attractive mouth ready to smile. She was not the girl next door, but maybe the sexy girl who lived next door to the wholesome girl next door. I preferred the natural, unaffected Candace, though I figured that most men would consider my deconstruction a desecration.

     The door opened and the predeconstructed Candace reappeared. There's another one out there, she said. He says the police framed him on a charge of manufacturing methamphetamines.

     How did they frame him?

     They planted a meth lab in his garage.

     Send him away, Candace.

     I had been a criminal defense attorney, licensed in the State of Florida, for only four months, and yet I had more work than I needed or wanted. Veteran lawyers in the Dunwoody Building tossed me cases as you might toss a chunk of gristly meat to the mutt under the table. Naturally none of the cases was interesting or remunerative. No society murderers, rich drug lords, corporate bandits, celebrity felons, or corrupt politicians. The lawyers cleared files by sending me their mopes: shoplifters, petty thieves, check kiters, scofflaws, repeat DUIs, abused wives and cuckolded husbands, women with microchips implanted in their wombs. A surprising number of my clients managed to have themselves photographed by security cameras while engaged in various crimes and misdemeanors.

     There was not much I could do for them. I pled out nearly all of the cases with the prosecutors. A few clients, contrary to my advice, demanded jury trials, got them, and got stiffer sentences than they would have received from plea bargains. I was astonished by the cavalier processes of the criminal justice system: a man might get a six-month suspended sentence by plea-bargaining; the same man, a year behind bars after a thirty-minute bench trial; and three years if he had the gall to inconvenience everyone by demanding his constitutional right to a jury trial. They were vindictive, those judges, those juries—twelve stone-faced, stone-hearted citizens good and true.

     Tom Petrie laughed at my outrage. Innocent, he called me. Jackanapes. Tom had a rich vocabulary of invective; jackanapes was a new insult. I told you to check voter registrations. You insist on empaneling Republicans.

     I want thoughtful, responsible, solid jurors, I said.

     Republicans, Baptist elders, retired civil servants with pinched mouths, menopausal divorcees, widows of slain law officers. Didn't they teach you anything at those night-school law classes?

     They taught me that the jury system is the glory of Anglo-American jurisprudence.

     He laughed.

     Maybe I wasn't meant to be a lawyer, Tom.

     That's another thing they forgot to tell you at law school.

*   *   *

A young woman was sitting on one of the client chairs as I passed through the outer office. We exchanged appraising glances. Candace, I assumed, was in our medieval lavatory. I hesitated for an instant, staring at the woman, and then went through the door and down the hall. While waiting for an elevator I was embarrassed to realize that I was silently reciting lines from a Marlowe poem: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight? Jackanapes.

     The elevator stalled between the second and third floors. The old building had electrical problems. Where both deliberate, the love is slight. I'd looked up jackanapes: it was in part defined as a cheeky fellow; bounder; coxcomb. (Coxcomb: a conceited dandy.) It could also mean a monkey or ape. A jolly word, jackanapes, but none of the definitions applied to me.

     I created a mental image of the visitor. She was an attractive woman of about thirty. Nothing rare in that: there are flocks of attractive native and migrating women around and about Florida. She was a brunette, and that was somewhat distinctive in these days when so many women were bleaching their hair blond and blonder, or dyeing it improbable shades of red.

     The elevator lurched, descended a couple of feet, and again halted. A voice echoed down the shaft, but I could not make out any words. The blower had shut off and it was getting stuffy in the old box. A glass-enclosed instruction card advised me to press the red button. I pressed it without hope.

     Thick black hair, uncompromisingly black, glossy with silvery highlights. Black eyebrows, gracefully arched, long black lashes, good cheekbones and a firm jawline, intriguingly curved lips, blue eyes—but you could not tell about eye color in these days of contact lenses. Complexion: creamy, maybe, beneath a bronzy suntan.

     Hey! the man high above shouted. Hey, Pablo, for Christ's sake, pull the breaker switch!

     The woman appeared alert, sexy, with a level challenging gaze and a piquant half smile. Was I reading too much into this brief encounter? It lies not in our power to love or hate; for will in us is overruled by fate.

     Pablo, for Christ's sake, at last pulled the breaker switch, and the elevator descended the last few yards to the ground floor.

*   *   *

I was half an hour late for lunch and was surprised to see that Petrie was still in the restaurant. Generally, you waited for Tom; Tom did not wait for you.

     Did the loan company repossess your Timex? he asked as I sat at the table.

     Thomas Petrie, Esquire, was a first-rate criminal defense lawyer, one of the best in the state, one of the best in the country according to him. He liked to say that he had been born poor, but born too with teeth bared and claws unsheathed. I came out of the swamp thirsty for blood. If you imagine lawfulness as a plateau and crime as a precipice, then you'd say that Tom walked very close to the edge, walked on air at times. Together we had been involved in enterprises that, viewed from even the most lenient perspective, qualified us for serious prison time.

     The elevator got stuck again, I said.

     Take the stairs.

     Tom's suite of offices occupied half of the Dun-woody Building's top floor; he usually jogged up and down the flights of stairs to stay fit. He was an athlete who looked slow and bookish.

     The restaurant was spread through four rooms, yuppied up in a pseudo–Art Deco style and mostly patronized by a generation that believed martinis were blended drinks, sweetened and brightly colored by fruits or fruity liquors. A waitress drifted over, and both Petrie and I ordered mugs of beer and Italian beef sandwiches.

     I just fell in love, I said.

     Tell me about it.

     I told him about my brief encounter with the brunette in the outer office.

     Look, he said, I hate, I really hate to sound like a psychologist—I have my pride. But your adolescent epiphany isn't surprising considering that your former fiancée got married Saturday. You probably fell in love at the precise instant, forty-eight hours later, that Martina said 'I do.'

     You see a mystical significance in that?

     I see a drowning man grasping at straws—a brunette straw.

     Were you at the wedding?

     Yes.

     Speak.

     It was . . . regal. It was like the uniting of two great dynasties. They should have held the wedding at Westminster Cathedral. White doves were released when the golden couple exited the church.

     No.

     A dozen white doves.

     And Martina?

     Beautiful. Glowing.

     She rarely glowed for me, I said. Just flickered a little now and then.

     Static electricity, maybe.

     Four fresh-faced twenty-somethings sat at a nearby table, and commenced speaking in the new American female dialect, a slurred baby-talk quacking that had originated in California and would only be stopped by the Atlantic Ocean. Snot what I wanned, one of the girls said. Swat he wanned.

     Go on, Tom, I said.

     Martina wore a tiara, and a wedding gown that must have cost ten grand. Gossamer, she was enveloped by mist and gossamer and fairy dust. The groom and his courtiers wore morning clothes.

     Mourning, at a wedding?

     M-o-r-n-i-n-g.

     What are morning clothes?

     Formal wear for daylight hours. Tails, top hats, all of that, except the color is gray.

     What else?

     Flowers, elfin flower girls, pretty bridesmaids, unctuous ushers, an Episcopal priest in gold vestment, candles, solemn vows, rice, doves, delirium.

     Jesus. That isn't Martina. She despised ritual. She wasn't churchy, not the radiant bride in white. Not the standard issue. Doves? It's crazy.

     Wake up. People play more than one role in a lifetime. For you, Marty was austere, independent, self-reliant, a tomboy grown into a pretty woman. But for the groom she is the loving bride, the attentive wife, the angelic mother-to-be.

     Christ. That's dishonest.

     She's gone. Give her up.

     Half a year ago she was mine.

     Martina could forgive you killing one man, but the second? That was de trop. Two is one too many. As Voltaire said alter leaving a Paris homosexual whorehouse: 'Once is an adventure; twice is a vice.'

     Our waitress arrived with the beer and sandwiches. Petrie was a food sniffer; he removed the top slice of bread and sniffed the spicy beef, sniffed the cole slaw and french fries, and then began eating with genteel savagery.

     I said, Did you send me the woman with the microchip in her womb?

     He swallowed, drank some beer. Nah. I keep the microchippies.

     The girls at the next table were simultaneously engaged in four separate conversations; listening to them was like rapidly dialing among four radio stations.

     I sent you the car thief, Petrie said.

     After lunch we walked down to the bay front for a smoke. Tom fired up one of his fifty-dollar bootleg Havanas; I got out a two-dollar cigarillo. We sat on a sun-heated slab of rock a few feet from where wavelets fizzed up on the sand. It was a blue day, blue sky and deeper blue sea, with puffball clouds reflected on the water and a warm breeze rustling through the royal palms that lined the esplanade.

     What do you see when you look at the lighthouse? he asked.

     A lighthouse.

     He quietly puffed his cigar and then, with fake sincerity, said, You don't see a phallus? A peppermint-striped phallus? Ellis Slocombe's phallus?

     I do now, damn you.

     Martina Karras had bought the old lighthouse at a government auction some years before. It lay half a mile offshore on a bare rock-slab reef. She lived in the blockhouse and had a studio at the base of the forty-foot tower. It had been my home too, in a way.

     Think they'll honeymoon out there? Petrie asked.

     I heard they're going to Paris.

     Paris in June. My. Think they'll live out there when they return?

     No. They'll buy a big house on a canal, join the homeowner's association, join the country club, entertain their peers, produce a couple of brats, grow old gracefully.

     You sound bitter.

     I am bitter. I'm going to go away. I'm clearing my files. I'm thinking about quitting the law.

     After four months? Good. I'll see that the local bar association, in gratitude, throws you a retirement party.

     It's a dreary, humiliating profession.

     It's unfair that you couldn't start at the top, Shaw. So where are you going?

     I thought I'd cruise the Caribbean in my boat.

     Listen, I need a full-time investigator for my office. You are just a sixteen as a lawyer; at best you can maybe get up to a twenty-four. But you're already a thirty-six as an investigator. I'll give you an office, an assistant, a good budget, more money than you'll ever earn making a mockery of the law.

     Petrie was referring to his Laws of Incompetence. The LOI were a flexible work in progress; Tom made them up as he went along, and did not hesitate to contradict an earlier stated law to suit present purposes. His scale ran from two to sixty. The lowest number was assigned to an individual who never got anything right until he died, and then, by thoroughly dying, was awarded two points. A sixty—the theoretical maximum, never achieved—indicated that one was competent sixty percent of the time. Rocket scientists, the standard of intelligence for the banal, according to Petrie, rated an average of forty-one. (A Mars probe misses Mars by sixty thousand miles. Why? Because half of the team was working in feet and inches; the other half used the metric system.) Petrie ranked himself as a very high fifty-four.

     We have only survived as a species, he would say, because so far we haven't been competent enough to kill every human on the planet. But where competence has failed, incompetence may succeed.

     As we walked back to the Dunwoody Building, I said, Tom, are you ever intimidated by women?

     Nah. I had four sisters, two older and two younger. And each of them had girlfriends. My childhood and early youth were oppressed by teenage females. Now, when I meet an intelligent, sophisticated, beautiful woman, I think of how she was at fifteen—sloppy, sullen, scheming, giggly, shrieking, pretentious—and I am at ease. I have been inoculated.

     Lucky you.

     Are you really going cruising on that little sailboat of yours?

     I think so. Yes.

     Right. Well, I haven't written a will in fifteen years, but for you . . .

THREE

The state attorney's offices were on the fifth floor of a building across the street from the courthouse. Nestor Naranjo usually kept his door open, though that didn't mean that you were welcome to enter. I stood in the doorframe until he crooked his finger, straightened the finger, and pointed to an uncomfortable armless wooden chair that was eight inches lower than Nestor's leather swivel chair. It had been arranged that way so that supplicants like me had to assume a subordinate position.

     Shaw, he said, removing his wire-framed reading glasses. Think of the devil.

     You've been thinking about me?

     Feverishly.

     Nestor ran the prosecutor's office while his boss, SA Craig Christensen, continuously ran for political office.

     What have you got? he asked.

     I removed four file folders from my attaché case. I want to plead out these cases.

     Why come to me? Why don't you deal with the prosecutors I assigned to those cases?

     Your young prosecutors are merciless, Nestor. It's a good thing Florida doesn't yet impose the death penalty for shoplifting or stealing fifteen dollars from a parking meter. Anyway, you have to approve the plea deals. I'm just cutting out the middle fascist.

     You sound like Petrie. He accepted the files from me and dropped them on his desk. I didn't see you at the wedding.

     I wasn't there, but I heard it was something grand.

     An extravaganza of ostentation. There was even a launching of white doves.

     I heard.

     They were kept in wooden crates on the church steps, and when the bride and groom emerged—voilà! an explosion of doves.

     I forgot to ask Petrie. Who gave the bride away?

     Her uncle.

     Phil? Phil was let out of jail for the wedding?

     For two hours. The sheriff sent along a couple deputies.

     Martina's uncle, Phil Karras, the man who had raised her, was awaiting trial on a charge of Murder One for killing his wife. Tom Petrie, his lawyer, naturally claimed that his client hadn't committed the crime; or, if he had, he was insane; or, if he wasn't insane, the killing was really a generous act of mercy. Alice had been suffering from Alzheimer's, the disease that Phil had terminated with a blast from a double-barreled shotgun.

     I said, I heard Phil's mind has deteriorated badly since he was locked up.

     You heard right.

     What do the psychologists say?

     The state's shaman says Karras is presently not fit to stand trial. Petrie's tame mercenary shaman says the same thing, of course.

     Have you made a deal with Tom? Maybe a few years in a mental institution for Phil?

     We haven't ironed out the details.

     You're being uncharacteristically candid today, Nestor.

     I am, aren't I? He folded his hands behind his neck and leaned back in the swivel chair.

     I can't imagine Craig going along with a deal.

     Craig is testing the political waters. He's found that Phil has some influential friends.

     Do you mind if I smoke?

     Yes.

     How did Phil behave at the wedding?

     Eccentrically, let us say. Like he'd wandered into a church when he actually intended to visit his country club. He performed his ceremonial duties well enough, but didn't seem fully aware of what was happening. He laughed at inappropriate moments, pinched a bridesmaid's bottom. Yesterday was one of his bad days.

     This is strange talk from a prosecutor, I said. Prosecutors always claim that the defendant is faking insanity.

     Phil does a lot of talking down at the jail. He says that you killed a man in Italy last summer. Says he saw you do it. Says, sometimes, that you killed his wife, Alice, too.

     Well, there you are. The man is sick.

     Karras tells a very detailed, credible story about Italy.